Over the last couple of months I’ve been doing a lot of code for fun in Glitch.
Glitch is a collabartive web platform that aims to make web programming accessible and fun - complete with real-time editing and hot-reloading built in. It’s a great platform for sketching out web apps, working with friends, or adapting samples other people share (“remixing”). It’s a great product, and I love the ethos behind it - and like a lot of things on the web in 2020, it’s commonly used for writing HTML and javascript, with default templates also available for Node + Express.js apps.
…but why not .NET Core?
I was in the middle of configuring some webpack jobs when I idley tweeted that it’d be great if the netcore team could support this as a deployment target. The glitch team shot across a few docs asking what an MVP would look like for netcore on glitch, and I idley, and mostly out of curiosity, typed dotnet into the Glitch command line prompt to see if the dotnet CLI just happened to be installed. And it was.
Armed with the wonderfully named glitchnomicon and the dotnet cli I created a fresh ANC (ASP.NET Core) MVC start project, and migrated the files one by one into a Glitch project.
With a little tweaking I’ve got the dotnet new project template running in Glitch, without any changes to the C# code at all.
Subtle changes:
- No Bootstrap
- Stripped out boilerplate layout
- No jQuery
- Removed “development” mode and “production” CSS filters from the views
- Glitch executes the web app in development mode by default so you see detailed errors
I’ve published some projects on Glitch for you to remix and use as you like.
ASP.NET MVC Starter Project
ASP.NET Starter Project (just app.run)
I’ll be adding more templates to the collection .NET Core Templates over time.
Glitch is awesome, and you should check it out.